


the truth of labyrinths

by ladymarvell



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 20:21:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6023404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymarvell/pseuds/ladymarvell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy and Clarke looked at each other. There were hints of a smile on both their faces. Clarke recognized it a first. But Bellamy recognized it as the beginning of a possibly huge mistake. </p><p>Despite this, Clarke looking at Bellamy with a smile on her face rather than with contempt, was a look Bellamy liked almost instantly. A realization both shocking and unwelcome.</p><p>"So...I guess we're dating?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	the truth of labyrinths

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Valentine's Day gift for Kier for the not so secret salty Valentine's Day thing. Hey saltbae! She asked for a fake dating au circa season 1. I hope you like it, Kier!!!
> 
> Also this is unedited and unbetad so its probably full of typos and random changing of tenses. So sorry!

Apparently, Finn Collins isn't the kind of boy who can take a hint. After his girlfriend fell to the Earth in a drop ship compiled completely of spare parts, one would think that would be a hint to stop flirting with girls who are not that girlfriend. Or you know, when the not-girlfriend tells him to stop flirting with her because he has a girlfriend. Either way the flirting continued.

It wasn't that Clarke didn't like Finn. She did. But she liked Raven more. She respected the girl who fell from the sky and she wanted the mend the rift that tore between them before they ever got a chance to meet, let alone build a friendship. She wanted to be friends. But that was hard to do with Finn following Clarke around and volunteering his free time to her convenience. All under the watchful eye of Raven, who looked at Clarke with a mixture of sadness and anger that made Clarke feel like the worst kind of person. Perhaps Finn was just trying to make up for not telling her, he already had a girlfriend before they slept together. But that seemed too little too late, in Clarke's opinion. And his insistence on spending so much time together didn't seem like well-intentioned niceties but rather unnecessary, annoying and counterproductive missteps in flirting.

So Finn was quickly becoming her least favorite person in camp and he was headed in Clarke's direction. In a moment of blind desperation to avoid another awkward confrontation with the floppy-haired insister, Clarke dipped into the nearest tent and came face to face with her second least favorite person. 

"You lost, Princess?"

Clarke looked at Bellamy Blake and made a quick decision.

"Finn is coming this way to convince me that the best use of my time right now is to go scavenging with him and I'd rather not."

Instead of looking sympathetic, Bellamy looked annoyed and he responded in kind.

"That sounds like a personal problem. Get out of my tent."

In any normal conversation between Bellamy and Clarke, this was the precise moment where Clarke said something snarky. Then what could've been a simple conversation between two normal people, turned into the two of them engaged in a shouting match heard across camp. But Finn always took her arguments with Bellamy as an opportunity to play the good guy and Clarke could hear Finn getting closer. 

"Bellamy, please." 

Her desperation to avoid Finn must have been obvious to everyone except Finn because Bellamy's face softened. The next thing Clarke knew, Bellamy's hands were on her hips and he pulled her closer to him. Clarke couldn't help the small gasp that escaped her as their bodies lined up unexpectedly. Bellamy leaned his face closer to Clarke's and then tent flap swished open. 

"Oh." Clarke heard Finn say quietly. Clarke figured this was her cue to say something but Bellamy had his thumb lightly tracing circles on the skin beneath the hem of her shirt and it was distracting.

"You mind, spacewalker? We're a bit busy." Bellamy said gruffly and dismissively. And though nothing in Bellamy's words revealed the statement to be, it sounded very much like an order.

Finn backtracked out of the tent. As soon as the sound of his steps faded into the background noise of the camp, Bellamy stepped away from Clarke with a smug smirk.

"Don't say I never gave you anything, Princess."

 

By midday, the whole camp knew that Bellamy and Clarke were secretly dating, hate-fucking frenemies, or madly in love and carrying out a torrid love affair against the wishes of Doctor Griffin and the Chancellor. At least those were just the few stories, Clarke heard being discussed throughout the day. Combined with the various dirty looks Bellamy's past conquests threw her way and the full-on head-to-toe blush Jasper sported when he passed on the completely innocent message to Clarke from Bellamy that he wanted to speak to her, Clarke knew that Finn wasn't the only one to come away from that scene thinking Bellamy and Clarke were doing more than co-leading a camp of 100 juvenile delinquents together. This was made even more abundantly clear, when Octavia Blake bounced her way in front of Clarke and practically shouted,

"Are you secretly dating my brother!?"

"What!?"

"Oh my god, you are!"

"Octavia, I'm not secretly dating your brother."

"You're just regularly dating him, then?"

"No." 

"Oh yeah! gotcha." Octavia said with a wink and a triumphant smirk on her face that she seemed to share with her brother. Octavia walked toward the makeshift mess hall, leaving Clarke staring at the empty spot she just occupied with a dumbfounded look of shock etched across her face. 

Clarke sighed and continued on her way to Bellamy's tent. Only to be greeted by yet another shouting Blake. Only this one didn't seem quite as gleeful.

"Spacewalker is a fucking gossip! Is there not a single person in this damn camp that doesn't think I'm sleeping with you?"

"Look. Calm down. I'll talk to Finn and set the record straight with everyone. It's not that big of a deal." Clarke tried to remedy. 

"Not the point, princess." Bellamy scoffed with a dismissive laugh. "Instead of taking the hint that you don't want to talk to him because he's an ass. He tells anyone who gives too long a second glance at his sad face, that it's because you already have a boyfriend like he doesn't already have a girlfriend."

Bellamy paced back and forth around the tent. Clarke tried to think of something to say but Bellamy interrupted with a suggestion of his own.

"Alright so, if you want to do this," Bellamy started. He faced her, standing tall and firm with one hand on his hip and the other pointed in her direction. He looked like he was about to deliver one of his game-changing inspirational speeches. The ones he usually doled out to convince people to volunteer for latrine duty for the 'good of the camp'. Only Bellamy Blake could make digging holes for shit sound like some grand journey you were about to embark on to complete your destiny. 

Clarke felt a shiver of anticipation crawl down her spine. She never had a speech directed to her specifically. Honestly she was looking forward to it.

"You can skip the whole explaining things to Finn and just let everyone continue thinking what they're thinking."

It wasn't the speech Clarke was expecting and the slight disappointment must have shown on her face because Bellamy continued with an edge of urgency.

"We don't have to confirm or deny anything. I just figured, it would help you get more things done around camp, if you weren't hiding in random tents to avoid,"

"No!" Clarke answered a bit too quick. "I mean," 

Finn had been staring at her with a dumb look of longing on his face, but Bellamy was right that he hadn't actually tried to talk to her all day. This plan, though far-fetched, was apparently the only hint, Finn could recognize.

"Clarke?"

"It's a ridiculous plan but it's the closest thing to getting Finn to leave me alone, short of banishing him."

"I could do that instead, if you want."

"No, Raven would probably go with him."

Bellamy and Clarke looked at each other. There were hints of a smile on both their faces. Clarke recognized it a first. But Bellamy recognized it as the beginning of a possibly huge mistake. 

Despite this, Clarke looking at Bellamy with a smile on her face rather than with contempt, was a look Bellamy liked almost instantly. A realization both shocking and unwelcome.

"So...I guess we're dating?" 

 

As it turned out, dating Clarke was not that much different than co-leading with Clarke. They both still spent their days going about their respective responsibilities. Clarke worked in the medbay, tending to the sick and hurt. She concocted remedies with Monty and organized herbs and equipment with Harper. 

Bellamy spent one half of his day training select delinquents for guard duty and the other half, helping to build cabins and reinforce the wall. But now when the working day was done, instead of spending his few precious hours alone, he spent them with Clarke. It was awkward at first. Bellamy and Clarke's first days as a 'couple' consisted of them sitting on opposite sides of his tent trying to ignore the whispering of nosey delinquents outside while she sketched and he reread a book found on one of the last scavenging trips.

After about a week of this, Bellamy couldn't take it anymore and he did what he does best. He opened his mouth.

"What are you always drawing over there?"

Clarke looked up at him with wide-eyes. Bellamy thought it looked like she had forgotten that she was in his tent. With him. She probably had.

"Just stuff."

 

"Stuff?"

"Places from the before the cataclysm. Um," Clarke furrowed her brow as she stared down at the page in front of her. She looked, Bellamy thought, cutely confused. "People."

"People?"

"Yes."

"Am I in there?"

"No!" Clarke shouted and then cringed. Bellamy couldn't stop the smirk that formed on his face even if he had felt inclined to try, which he didn't.

"I am! Let me see." Bellamy said, putting his book down and reaching for Clarke's. But Clarke clutched the pad of paper to her chest. 

"No. It's not finished." Clarke didn't think Bellamy Blake was the kind of person who pouted but there he was pouting at her. Clarke huffed and turned back a few pages in her notebook. She wasn't going to show him the portraits she had been working on but she could show him some doodles. The page showed various landmarks from the pre-cataclysm Earth. Some of her favorite things to draw. Her cell back on the Ark was mural to the greatness of Earth's past and Clarke redrew it so she wouldn't forget why she was so excited to come to Earth on the days when it was hard to remember or easy to forget.

"This one is just a bunch of places from a textbook back on the ark." She told Bellamy, passing the pad over, trusting him not to turn the page simply because she requested that he didn't. 

He stared at the page for a while. His hand traced the lines she made until she became self-conscious. His face was so passive, Clarke wondered what he thought. Found herself surprised that she cared for his opinion.

When he finally spoke, he asked, “You drew these from memory?” Clarke nodded her head. “I like this one." He said and Clarke crawled across the tent to sit beside him. She looked at what image he was pointing to.

"Oh. That's the,"

"Pantheon"

"Yeah! It was,"

"Built to honor the gods of Rome. I know what the Pantheon is." 

There is a moment then, with Bellamy looking at the page and Clarke looking at Bellamy. 

"Do you want it?"

"What?"

"The picture."

"No. It's yours."

"I can draw another." Clarke took her book back and ripped the edge of the page where the Pantheon sat. She held it out to Bellamy. "Here. Take it. Consider it a gift for being my fake boyfriend." 

Bellamy rolled his eyes but he took the paper pantheon anyway, folding it gently and putting it between the pages of his book.

After that, Clarke began to find little things left behind for her. A purple strawberry slipped onto her plate at dinner, a flower on her lab table, a pencil with pink and green colored horses depicted up and down the sides that Clarke kept underneath her pillow. 

But the best gift Clarke found was the one left outside her tent, one morning. It was a square package wrapped up a gauzy fabric. Clarke unwrapped it carefully and found within, a book. 

The pages were blank and thick and wavy. With different colors and textures like the quilts on the ark created from clothes too worn out to mend and wear. No page in the book was the same. It was all a mismatch mashup of junk making up the paper. Clarke could see a shimmery piece of the paper that looked like the wrapper to a protein pack and something that looked like the skeleton of a leaf in the center. There were flower petals, strips of seaweed, and splinters of wood as well. It was the most beautiful gift Clarke had ever received and it made her turn away from the medbay and head in the direction of Bellamy's tent. She barged in without warning. Bellamy was lying on his pile of covers but he sat up quickly. Before he could ask what Clarke wanted, she held the book out for him to see. To which he simply said, 

"Oh." 

Clarke sat down next to him.

"Thank you." 

She opened the book, looked at the pages, holding them up for Bellamy to see.

"This is amazing, Bellamy." Clarke shook her head in disbelief. "How did you get this?"

"Monroe found a book on different crafts in the last bunker we found and there was a chapter on paper making. I figured, with all the drawing,"

"You made this?"

"It wasn't that hard," Clarke put her hands over Bellamy's making him pause.

"Bellamy" His name was soft in her mouth and he turned his hands up to hold hers without even thinking about it. "Thank you."

She gave his hands a squeeze.

"You're welcome."

After that, the gift-giving changed from random trinkets that popped up in random places to Bellamy popping up wherever Clarke was. Bellamy assigned himself as the guard on duty at the medbay. He showed up one day, placed a kiss on Clarke's cheek and sat down in the corner with an apple and his gun. Clarke blushed, Harper giggled and an everyday tradition began. Clarke worked, Bellamy guarded. And then together, they would eat. The fire would spit embers and a glow into the air while Clarke and Bellamy sat close, their knees bumping together every once in awhile and it made Clarke's heart beat just a little bit faster. 

For Bellamy, every day spent with Clarke, was a day in which the world seemed to grow. Every moment spent with Clarke became new ways to see the things around him. So much so that even during the times when the two were apart, Bellamy would find himself wondering what she would say or think about things. Her voice was so crystal clear in his head. But the thing that changed most was how he saw her. 

When they first met, Bellamy saw the way Clarke carried herself, high and mighty and morally sound and he hated everything she was. Privileged in a way she could never know. He felt the guilt of a trigger-pulled heavy on his chest and she called out all the things he hated about himself. 

But she also reminded him, that despite all the mistakes he made, that he had a choice. He didn't have to keep making the wrong ones. This girl handed him forgiveness in her open hands. Held him blameless during the moment when the shame of his actions dared to swallow him whole. He knew after that, that Clarke would always be this important figure to him. She would always be a person he respected. Even if they weren't friends. Even if he didn't like her. 

But all this time spent together, Bellamy had come to the realization that he actually did like Clarke. He liked the way her face scrunched up when she saw something she didn't like, how she tapped her fingers when considering a problem, the way she smiled at him in the small moments.

Suddenly the questions Bellamy asked himself changed from 'what would Clarke think of this?' to 'I wonder, how soft Clarke's lips are? Does she taste like apples and moonshine?' 

But somewhere between considering Clarke and considering Clarke's kisses, the smell of antiseptic became one that brought a smile to his face because it reminded him of Clarke.

He doesn't dare think of what he looked like standing outside the medbay with a goofy grin on his face but apparently it was a ridiculous enough image to have Octavia drag him into the closest corner. She angrily whispered at him to get a grip, to stop walking around camp like a lovesick idiot and just talk to Clarke. 

So Bellamy took his sister's advice. 

 

Sort of. 

 

He doesn't really have a talk with Clarke, instead he planned a trip for them. He left Miller in charge of the guards and Octavia in charge of everyone else and Raven in charge of Octavia for two-days while the co-leaders would be away.

When Bellamy asked Raven to keep an eye out. She laughed and punched his shoulder. 

"Got a romantic getaway planned?" 

Raven had been all around friendlier to both Bellamy and Clarke since they started 'dating' and Bellamy was pretty sure that Finn's constantly sour mood only added to Raven's amusement. Bellamy rubbed the spot where Raven's fist hit his arm. 

"Something like that." 

It was another early morning for Clarke when Bellamy slipped into her tent and laid down beside her.

He only laid there for a minute before Clarke started to wake up. 

"Hey" she said burrowing her head under the cover. 

"Hey." His voice almost too soft to hear. "I've got a surprise for you." 

A smile spread across Clarke's face and Bellamy thinks, soon.

Bellamy spent the majority of the trip telling Clarke weird stories about bears in the sky, princesses locked in towers and surprisingly even one about an enchanted trashcan that made Clarke laugh so hard they had to stop so she could catch her breath. He was finishing up a story about a hero in a maze and princess with red thread. Clarke was right behind him, her eyes watching the steps her feet take, with the occasional glance up to see Bellamy leading her through the trees. 

"Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth but it takes a hero to get out of one." He said, his left hand reached out to take hold of a tree trunk and swing around so he faced Clarke. Clarke stopped just in time to avoid bumping into him but not soon enough to avoid the closer than close proximity she found herself in.

"Is that what you are?" Clarke asked with a hand on her hip and a haughtiness in her tone. "My hero?"

"Maybe you're my hero." His smile was teasing and it made Clarke's stomach twist in a funny way and her heart clench in her chest in a not-so-funny way. She realized then, quite suddenly, that she wanted to be. She wanted to be Bellamy's hero. To protect him. That Bellamy, with all his bravado and charm, was just a boy that Clarke would do absolutely anything to protect.

It was not long after that, that they arrived at their destination. It was a field of fading flowers, bright red in the sun like a field of flame.

"This is..." Clarke trailed off. She wanted to say beautiful, inspiring, breath-taking, life-changing, thank you Bellamy, thank you but no words fell past her lips. 

Fortunately, Bellamy didn't need words spoken aloud to understand all that Clarke wanted to say. He looked from Clarke's face to the field and back again before speaking.

"I know."

All the wonders of Earth seemed dwarfed by the dangers that every moment was a literal fight for survival. A chance to live. But it was moments like this. Looking out into an endless space of beauty that reminded Clarke what all that fighting to live was actually for, living. 

Bellamy and Clarke spend the rest of their day setting up a camp for their overnight stay. Clarke can tell this was different than all the other times they've spent together. This wasn't them eating at the campfire in view of everyone. This wasn't kisses shared In the medbay witnessed by Harper. Nothing they did in this field had an audience or a purpose other than making them happy. 

And oh god, how it made Clarke happy.

 

They went fishing and berry picking. Clarke may have thrown half the berries they found at the back of Bellamy's head and Bellamy may have splashed water at Clarke and their fish did end up slightly overcooked when they got distracted by a pair of turtles scuffling past their camp for two. But each moment was a perfect moment. 

It was the most peaceful day on Earth Clarke's ever had, followed by the most peaceful night.

Their sleeping bags were set up together with covers from both their tents back home to make one big soft bed to sleep in together. They laid there together staring at the ceiling of starlight on the backdrop of the black night sky that used to be their home. 

Bellamy was a certain kind of calm in his sleep. Moon beams reflected beautifully across his face, illuminating that he had as many freckles as there were stars in the sky. An infinite amount of constellations in the sky, an infinite amount of stories across his skin but Clarke wanted to count them all anyway.

It was almost a task too impossible to take on, like getting out of a labyrinth. But what's true of counting infinite things and maneuvering within labyrinths must also be true of love. For Clarke was aware that there was a certain impossibility of loving Bellamy Blake but it was something she wanted to do anyway and she fell asleep counting.

 

Clarke woke up to birds chirping,the sun rising on the horizon, her heart full of love for Bellamy, and her head on his chest.

Sometime in the night, the two of them had gravitated to each other.

"Good morning" Bellamy said, his voice rough with sleep that caused a shiver down Clarke's back.

"It is. The best of mornings."

"Clarke, we should probably have a talk"

"That doesn't sound like something said on the best of the mornings." 

"I brought you here because I wanted to talk to you."

Clarke sat up. One hand still on Bellamy's chest, holding her above him and looked down at his face.

"What wrong?"

Bellamy put his hands over Clarke's on his chest. He brought her hand to his mouth and placed a kiss on her knuckles. 

"Bellamy?"

"Clarke, I love you."

When Clarke didn't declare her love back, Bellamy wondered if he perhaps misread the whole situation. Were his feelings one-sided? But relief washed over him instantly when Clarke took his face in both her hands and kissed him. Her lips were soft and sure against his. Bellamy sat up, never breaking the kiss, but wrapping his arm around Clarke until his hand rested on her back and he flipped over so she laid underneath him and he fit snugly between her legs. She laughed into his mouth and when Bellamy trailed his kisses to her neck, Clarke said it back between small gasps, 

"I love you too."

 

When they make their way back to camp, Bellamy's hand catches Clarke's and she doesn't let go. 

She thinks, she never will.


End file.
